It’s good for search engines – PPC enables search engines to cater to searchers and advertisers simultaneously. The searchers comprise their user-base, while the advertisers provide them with their revenue stream. The engines want to provide relevant results, first and foremost, while offering a highly targeted, revenue-driving advertising channel.
You have now reached the final step of creating a keyword strategy: keyword research. Quality keyword research is as essential as doing market research for marketing strategy. By the same token, forming a keyword strategy for B2B marketing and SEO needs heavy research as well. When doing keyword research, there are three important factors to remember:
With a clear understanding of our objectives and audience, we can now determine how we want to target our prospects across the AdWords network. There are multiple targeting options available, from location to demographics and display ads to video ads. The trick is to tailor your adverts to deliver the best results based on how your users browse the web. This chapter provides you with the primary elements required to accurately target your campaign.
Keywords are the crucial foundation for online marketing efforts, and in this course, author Matt Bailey shows how you best structure search engine optimization and pay-per-click plans around the insights you glean from keyword research. He helps you explore the sources for keywords and build a keyword list with research and management tools like Raven Tools, Moz, SEMrush, and Wordtracker. He shows you how to filter and interpret keyword data, observe trends, and better understand the intent of the searcher, and how to develop an informed strategy and implement keywords throughout your site for maximum searchability. Matt also covers how to apply your keyword insights to Google AdWords campaigns and measure the results of your SEO and AdWords efforts.
Funny thing is we’re not seeing users click on the extension itself very often – slightly more often than we’d see for sitelinks, but not by much – maybe 15 percent of total clicks, albeit not necessarily on the extension itself. It may be the way that we’ve set it up (we say chat with a live expert rather than text us), so that may have skewed the behavior.
Instead of immediately sponsoring a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign for certain keywords, keep an eye on your competitors for the best moment to do it. An SEM campaign implies a daily expenditure that most companies can’t afford long-term, so they won’t keep it up for long. If you are determined to spend some money on it, don’t just go crazy and then measure your ROI. After 3 – 4 months of watching, you should know if it’s worth it for your business to spend money on search engine ads. For an advanced strategy, try to identify your competitors’ timing for purchasing search engine ads, and try to replace them when they are not actively sponsoring results.

Preparing a Competitor Analysis is an activity that all Product Managers undertake at some point in the job. As Product Managers, having solid knowledge of our rivals and their activity in the marketplace helps us make better decisions during the strategic product planning phase. It ensures that we’re ready to respond to our competitors and exploit any weakness in order to gain a larger share of the pie.

b) Compare to your competitors pages and devise a plan to beat them. Sort of–I may want to write a follow up piece to this checklist with what comes next! It may not be realistic for you to go toe-to-toe with Amazon, for instance, if they have more linking root domains than your site does. However, if it's clear that you've got a very poor backlinks profile and your competitors outperform you here across the board, that means it's probably time to start discussing creative link building strategies, or content marketing plans.

By sharing this information, you can align all stakeholders that are involved with any kind of messaging (i.e., print, TV, PR, SEO, PPC, email, blog posts, etc.) and get everyone consistently using your targeted keywords. As your audience observes messages from each of these channels, they will see that consistency. This can highly influence which keywords they then use when they use a search engine to find you or your products. These are, of course, keywords you already rank well for, which will help to increase visibility and branding even more for your entire organization.

Working on common practice tasks such as negative matching, keyword expansion and more are the right things to do for an account, and there’s a proper place and time to do them. Without a policy governing how to manage our PPC accounts, we’re “stringing tactics together,” which creates misalignment between volume of work done versus meaningful work that’s impacting results positively.

A quick and easy way to compare your product or service with similar ones on the market is to make a competition grid. Down the left side of a piece of paper, write the names of four or five products or services that compete with yours. To help you generate this list, think of what your customers would buy if they didn't buy your product or service.

Lower Costs: When there is a near-infinite supply of search query impressions each month, your strategy is to lower your cost per click in order to drive more click (and conversion) volume to your website. This generally involves making use of keyword list refinement (match types, negative keywords) and lowering bids while keeping an eye on average position.

So there you have it, Xtensio’s Competitive Analysis Template. Remember this document is super flexible — you’re not bound to use any category the way we have it. Click inside text modules and type away, add new modules, graphs, charts, images, etc, drag & drop to reformat — whatever the case is, make something great. And if you’re working on a team, add your colleagues to join in the editing process with Xtensio’s collaboration feature.
The enterprise sales process is reserved for highly complex products sold at a high price. Because enterprise products provide so much value and prospects take longer to evaluate the product, companies must adopt a complex selling process and longer sales cycles. Selling to large enterprises with a high ASP means competing against rivals with high-touch sales models.
Let’s start with an easy one: target the areas your business serves. If your restaurant has one location in Chicago, set your search campaigns to only show to searchers in and around Chicago! If you’re an ecommerce site that serves the Pacific Northwest, don’t show your ads outside of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. This is the most basic way to ensure that you’re not wasting clicks – and money – on consumers who can’t convert.
Using negative keywords in PPC campaigns is an often overlooked but highly effective strategy. These are keywords that you add to your campaign that you don’t want to target. Adding negative keywords will let Google know that it should not show your campaigns in searches that include these words. This is a crucial step in order to make sure that you don’t waste money by displaying your ad for irrelevant searches.
Analyze Competitive Information Once you've gathered all of the competitive data you have been able to locate, it's analysis time. You should analyze to determine product information, market share, marketing strategies, and to identify your competition's strengths and weaknesses. Product Evaluation You should know from your sales staff and customer feedback what product features and benefits are most important to your customers and potential customers. A product's or service's competitive position is largely determined by how well it is differentiated from its competition and by its price.
Thanks for a great read. The holy grail of marketing is the ability to link advertising directly to consumer purchases. Increasingly, geo-targeted campaigns are making this dream a reality. Geotargeting doesn’t have to mean getting down to the local level. Larger companies can use geotargeting on a regional basis to locate specific audiences for their marketing campaigns. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc., are all offering these services.
Use voice search to your advantage by skewing your ad strategy toward answering questions customers need to know (intent), rather than just including keywords. Search engine AI for voice and mobile search is getting more sophisticated and better at serving results that meet the user’s intent, therefore PPC best practices will be continually refined.
Comparative user testing to the rescue: you ask the participants to evaluate your website as well as the websites of your top 2 competitors. To avoid biased feedback, try not to disclose which company you are with, and mix up the order in which you show the websites to the participants. Not to overwhelm the participants, limit the number of websites to 3 per person.
You’ll often find your hottest leads among people who have already encountered your business once. Depending on your industry, it may be unlikely for people to purchase your product the first time they visit. If you’re an e-commerce operation selling lower-ticket items, you may be able to send people directly to a sales page with excellent results. But if you’re like the dishwasher store we invented above, visiting your PPC landing page may be one step in a larger research process for your customers.

Some very general words such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results. If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords). The greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. There are a number of different tools you can use to determine thecompetitiveness of a specific keyword as well as suggest and help you brainstorm new keyword ideas.

If you have and use a smartphone, it’s possible for you to set location-based reminders for yourself, right now. You can, for example, tell your phone to alert you when you’re within range of the frame shop, so that new piece of art doesn’t become a six-month fixture in your trunk. Or, if you’ve attended a concert lately, and the band sends you a push notification to buy some gear while you’re in the venue, they’ve likely used geofencing.

Part of designing your keyword strategy is making sure you target keywords that will bring in enough traffic to be worth the effort. There’s no minimum number of searches for a keyword - that depends on your niche and your ability to convert visitors into sales. If you’ve got a Pro or Premium WooRank account, use SERP Checker’s new search volume feature to track estimated monthly searches for your keywords, as well as historical ranking data. If you’re already using SERP Checker, the search volume will appear for your keywords automatically. If you haven’t used it yet, just enter your keywords in the tool and you’ll see your data within 24 hours.

Reason: This metric can help you to know if you have well-organized content. Traffic generated from certain keywords can provide good insight into which pages a visitor typically sees as a result of that keyword query. In case you are using Google Analytics for measuring your visits, you can do it within the following path: Traffic sources > Search > Organic > Landing Pages as 1st dimension & 2nd dimension: Keyword.

You have now reached the final step of creating a keyword strategy: keyword research. Quality keyword research is as essential as doing market research for marketing strategy. By the same token, forming a keyword strategy for B2B marketing and SEO needs heavy research as well. When doing keyword research, there are three important factors to remember:

If you don't know the difference between head terms and long-tail keywords, let me explain. Head terms are keywords phrases that are generally shorter and more generic -- they're typically just one to three words in length, depending on who you talk to. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are longer keyword phrases usually containing three or more words.

Attribution. Use attribution data to prove the influence of PPC on conversions either cross-channel or within the channel. For instance, you might learn that certain campaigns don’t convert well, and the instinct is to turn them off. However, if they lead to conversions in other campaigns, you’ll want to allocate budget to keep the conversion path open.
A transactional sales approach to customer acquisition is best for products with a higher average selling price (ASP) then self-service solutions. Customers expect to see a demo, or even try the product. In fact, when customers are paying more, they expect more hand-holding throughout the process. While this can drive up organizational costs and complexity for a SaaS vendor, it can yield significant revenues and long-term customer loyalty. For this approach, companies need to optimize their sales, marketing, and support in a way that allows them to build a relationship with the customer over the customer lifetime. Most SaaS companies fall under this category.
Reason: If visitors find your website with a certain keyword but you have a high bounce rate, that’s enough to know that something is not going as it should. Ask yourself and test if it is a problem with content quality, appearance, etc. There is often more than one explanation for a high bounce rate, and there could be more than one solution. If you are totally lost at this point, a feedback session with five potential users might provide some insightful ideas.
Annual ReportsIf your competitor is a publicly-held company, many of its reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are available on the SEC-Edgar Web site. Annual reports provide financial information, including sales volume, revenue increases, and their total market share. 10-K reports provide still more detail, and are supplemented by the quarterly 10-Qs. 8-Ks show significant events such as acquisitions and board membership changes when they occur between 10-K and 10-Q filings. Annual reports from privately-held corporations are sometimes available through friends, relatives, and business acquaintances who own stock in a competitor's company.
Limiting your organization to direct competitors only might lead you to a very narrow view of the market. This framework allows you to evaluate companies that aren’t just your direct competitors but companies that could easily move into your turf. You want to consider companies that aren’t currently in your category but could potentially leverage their product or technology in your space.
This is the paid search strategy that is deployed most often by search marketers and for good reason: it focuses purely on maximizing the profitability of campaigns. For most of us, that is the reason why we continue to spend money with search engines, and why the industry keeps on growing year over year. We manage campaigns to maximize profitability and we don’t have to worry about budgets as long as it’s profitable. Or at least that’s what we hope will happen.
But while many marketers understand the value of geotargeting, not many are ‎likely to understand how the technology behind it works. Having a firm grasp on ‎the technology though is actually critical in this case, as different solutions take ‎different approaches to the problem of determining the physical location of a ‎consumer, and the simplest solution is usually the least accurate. Just as traditional ‎strategies don’t always translate well to digital, many desktop strategies don’t ‎translate well to mobile. ‎
Jeff Baum is Director of Services at Hanapin Marketing and a seasoned PPC advertising professional with Hanapin Marketing. a 13 year track record of success in digital advertising. He has developed and implemented strategies to substantially grow revenue and profits for a variety of lead generation and e-commerce businesses. He has also been responsible and accountable for managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in PPC advertising spend per month. Jeff is a recurring writer for Hanapin's blog and PPC Hero.
Sometimes even the most savvy among us can feel like a confused great-granny on a MacBook Pro running Linux when it comes to the newest, latest tech, and how it actually works. Location-based marketing is already happening. All of the available tools provide opportunities to serve highly localized, highly relevant communications to your customers, based on where they are right now. But what exactly are those options, and how do they work?
Every business can benefit from attracting higher value customers. Whether you’re a real estate company looking for high net worth individuals looking to buy property or a B2B SaaS company looking for a higher average revenue per user (ARPU), attracting customers who will pay you more than others is a powerful way to amplify the growth of your business.
So there you have it, Xtensio’s Competitive Analysis Template. Remember this document is super flexible — you’re not bound to use any category the way we have it. Click inside text modules and type away, add new modules, graphs, charts, images, etc, drag & drop to reformat — whatever the case is, make something great. And if you’re working on a team, add your colleagues to join in the editing process with Xtensio’s collaboration feature.

For both teams, first reactions from people were often strongly negative. I cringe to think what focus groups would have done with these ideas. But, Chesky and Gebbia, and Hyman and Fleiss, were undeterred. To these founders, their ideas were obvious and they set out to find investors and employees who got the vision when most everyone else did not.

Beyond the city level, your geotargeting on Facebook can further narrow your targeted customers to within miles. For example, a fairly standard radius is 10 miles and closer when you’re targeting a specific product or service in a particular vicinity. If you’re in a more rural setting, you can expand that radius to 20 or 25 miles. Urban areas like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York are targeted within one mile.
As of 2017, there are over 5,000 products in the martech sphere alone competing for business in complex and overlapping ways. Some companies leverage their expertise and resources to enter new markets. Salesforce is a great example; look at the number of martech categories it’s listed in. With so much competition, SaaS companies can't win on features alone; they must win on brand and customer experience.
The Keyword Planner is a free tool, but you'll need to set up a Google AdWords account first if you don't have one already. Once you're set up and logged in, go to the Tools bar at the top of the home page and you'll find the Keyword Planner there. Click Search for new keyword and ad group ideas. You'll be able to see suggestions in both the Ad group ideas tab and the Keyword ideas tab. You can add new keywords to an ad group by clicking the double arrows >> next to the keyword or remove them by clicking on the ad group and then the X next to that keyword.
Although more and more keywords are getting encrypted by Google every day, another smart way to come up with keyword ideas is to figure out which keywords your website is already getting found for. To do this, you'll need website analytics software like Google Analytics or HubSpot's Sources tool. Drill down into your website's traffic sources, and sift through you organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site.
Do I Need to Analyze All of My Competitors? There are several markets where it is relatively easy to name every competitor. These are concentrated markets where only a handful of competitors exist. If this is the scenario for your product or service, you will need to develop an analysis for each competitor. The steel industry and automobile industry are examples of these types of markets. If you are selling in a market with many competitors, your job of analyzing the competition becomes a little more difficult. Since it is unrealistic to collect and maintain information on dozens of competitors, you will be able to save yourself valuable time, without sacrificing the integrity of your competitive analysis, by using the old 80/20 rule. In fragmented markets with many competitors, it is most probable that 80% of the total market revenues are accounted for by 20% of the competition. It's the 20% you would examine most closely. For instance, in the computer industry, the personal computer market, is represented by hundreds of clone manufacturers with the majority of the market being captured by a handful of manufacturers such as Compaq, IBM, and Apple. When using this approach it is important to keep abreast of your market for new and upcoming players who through some variable, whether it be new technology or an aggressive advertising campaign, may become a dominant player. What Means are Available to Limit and Control the Competition? Marketers of different brands of products will often pursue a particular market segment. Market Segmentation, which is the means of breaking down larger markets into smaller ones requiring different marketing mixes, is a means for strengthening and focusing your attempt to limit and control the competition. There are however, a broad range of strategies a business can employ in a competitive environment — from price changing and new packaging to improving customer service and new product development. CONDUCTING AND PREPARING YOUR COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS [top] Conducting and preparing your competitive analysis will follow these steps:
If you have and use a smartphone, it’s possible for you to set location-based reminders for yourself, right now. You can, for example, tell your phone to alert you when you’re within range of the frame shop, so that new piece of art doesn’t become a six-month fixture in your trunk. Or, if you’ve attended a concert lately, and the band sends you a push notification to buy some gear while you’re in the venue, they’ve likely used geofencing.

Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. Far too often, I see organizations skip this important step and get right into keyword mapping, optimizing content, or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.